For the Relief of Unbearable Pressure: A Profile of Nathan Englander

Within two weeks of finishing up at Iowa in 1996, Englander found
himself on the floor of the house of some friends, back in
Jerusalem—the city where he would spend the next six years, working on
his stories, watching helicopters take off from the Knesset when there
was trouble, and hanging out in cafés hoping they didn't get blown up.

He found a tiny, cheap apartment where water dripped off the
fixtures when it rained, and he scraped by until he got word that Aragi
had clinched a two-book deal for the collection—which included "The
Twenty-seventh Man," the story that Brodie had first helped him
revise—and a novel, which by now he had already started.

"He works his ass off. He's wonderfully obsessive about the sound of a
sentence," says McCann. "He sweats on the page," says Weldon. "He
bleeds on the page and he does what he needs to do. And he'll go off
and work on something, and rework it and rework it. That's the kind of
discipline we're talking about. He understands the process in a way
that not everybody does."

Once For the Relief of Unbearable Urges came out, Englander
focused solely on the novel, which would take much longer to complete.
"We have to sort of carbon-date it at this point," says Englander when
asked how long he worked on it. "I found this old picture from
Jerusalem, and in it you can see one of my notebooks, and you can see
what I was working on. It's this novel!" Englander isn't even exactly
sure when he started it.

"He wrote it first by hand on yellow legal pads," says Orringer,
"stacks and stacks of which I'd see in his apartment when my husband
and I came to visit. When the draft was finished, he typed it all on
his computer, then rewrote it, then showed it to his first readers,
then rewrote it again."

"I saw the process of him writing this book, which was [at least] a
ten-year project," says McCann. "It's quite extraordinary, and I
admired and envied that he could have such patience and endurance and
time, to be honest, to work so single-mindedly. Because he really did
nothing else."

However long it took to finish, the important thing for Englander's readers is that TheMinistry of Special Cases
is complete, and they can now see the years of work that went into it.
The novel, which tells the story of Kaddish Poznan, bears many of the
hallmarks of Englander's short stories—the same dark humor, the same
pathos, and the same timeless feeling of being about everything and
just one thing all at the same time.

But The Ministry of Special Cases is also wider and deeper and bigger than For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
It is a complete world that covers a vast territory and tells a
seamless and alluring story: What does it mean to lose your past and
your future? How can a father atone for his greatest failure? How do we
choose events from our past to construct our present? What does it mean
to be part of a community? What does it mean to love a place that
betrays you?

These are some of the questions Englander started to wonder about
during the years he lived in Jerusalem. Sometimes, he would hang out
with a group of Argentine Jews who'd come to Israel looking for a
better life, but who remained wholly, unapologetically, and
enthusiastically Argentine, even if their homeland had broken their
hearts in the worst way. It was a feeling Englander was beginning to
grasp for himself.

"I love Jerusalem," he says now, looking back. "And more and more I identified myself as a Yerushalmi,
a Jerusalemite. I wondered what it meant to love a city when its future
is in so many different people's hands, and so many people are fiddling
with it and fighting over it. I got really interested in the idea of
loving a city and watching it crumble around you. That's how I got
interested in the tragic love of city and of what's out of the
individual's control. What is it to truly love a place?" It is a
question that informs every page of The Ministry of Special Cases.

These days, aside from promoting The Ministry of Special Cases,
Englander is on to other things: short stories he's been meaning to
write, and some nonfiction, too. There's even another novel in the
works. "For the last couple years I've been taking notes and sketching,
and I have files and all that stuff," he says. "That's how I knew I
might actually live to finish [The Ministry of Special Cases], when my brain started to free up space. I think something was let go."

But before he goes too deep into any new world, Englander will be
spending some time in this one, doing some traveling, some public
speaking. Maybe he'll even try to take a little well-earned time off.
"It's been a long haul," he says. "It's been a decade of me just
hammering."

For now, though, he's enjoying being back in the present, in his
apartment, doing things like staring at his ceiling and wondering about
all that he's left undone over the years spent writing his second book.
He has left the Argentina of The Ministry of Special Cases behind
with a mix of relief, remorse, fear, and elation, as well as a nagging
sense that there's a lot to catch up on. Friends to be contacted. Bills
finally to be paid. Cracks to be repaired.

Frank Bures writes for Tin House, Wired, Mother Jones, and other magazines. His work has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). He is the books editor for World Hum, an online literary travel magazine.